Clearing Up How To Gain Lean Muscle Mass

[crossfic]

From what i have learnt through people and articles gaining lean muscle mass has nothing to do with the exercise's you do, wether it be body weight or weight lifting, reps and sets -obviously 3-5 will gain more strength than muscle but 8-12 will not make you bulky, but its down to diet e.g. how much fat carbs and protein you take per day. Is this true or am i worng?

[Karri Kytömaa]

Well it's not black and white but generally diet (and illegal supplements) has bigger role than your rep ranges. And resistance doesn't matter at all, your muscles don't know whether they are moving you or iron. But once your diet is right, you can optimize your training towards muscle growth, which tends to be around that 8-12 reps and relatively high volume.

[optik169]

You're right that it comes down to diet and exercise is also a very big component.  

 

Everyone expends a certain amount of energy on a daily basis.  You have to intake more calories than you expend to gain weight.  That weight you gain will go towards muscle and fat.  It gets really complicated after this so I'm just going to stick to the barebones basics.

 

TDEE or Total Daily Energy Expenditure can be used as a good estimate of how many calories you burn daily (not including through exercise).  It differs per person.  The most effective method of determining this would be trial and error but it's a good starting point.  

 

Let's say my TDEE is 2000 Calories.  In a given day, I expend 2000 calories going about my daily business.  I have to eat 2000 calories (of protein, carbs, fat, etc) to maintain my current weight.  

 

Let's say I workout for 1 hour that day and burn 500 calories.  My energy expenditure for the day would now be 2500 Calories.  I would have to eat that many Calories to maintain my current weight.  

 

Say I want to gain weight.  I would then eat at a Calorie surplus.  a 200-300 calorie surplus is a good goal for building lean muscle mass and limiting the amount of fat you're putting on while eating at a Calorie surplus.  Each day I would be aiming for around 2700-2800 calories.

 

Why 200-300 calories?  A pound of "weight" is said to be roughly equivalent to 3500 calories.  That means if I eat at a surplus or deficit of 3500 Calories per week, I would gain or lose roughly 1 pound of weight.  That number can be split up for daily use and ends up being 500 Calories per day.  There's a limit on how much muscle you can build in a given week.  This number is obviously different for someone who has just started vs. someone who has been training for years.  I believe the maximum amount of muscle you can build per week is somewhere around 0.7 lbs.  If you're eating at a 500 Calorie surplus, you're going to put on fat in addition to this muscle.  That's why I prefer 200-300 Calories.  At a rate of 0.5 lbs per week, most of that (depending on diet of course) should go towards building muscle.  

 

Just count your calories and workout.  Whether you exercise in the 3-5 rep range or 8-12 rep range, etc, you will build muscle as long as you're progressively increasing your weight or moving on to more difficult variations of an exercise.  

 

As far as the food component goes, it'll take a little while to research what exactly you want to eat.  Just try to stick to meat, fish, vegetables, nuts, fruits... basically anything unprocessed.  0.8 to 1g of protein per lb of lean muscle mass should be a more than sufficient amount of protein to build muscle.  

[Raul S]

Diet plays a massive role in the development of muscle, but saying that exercise selection won't make a difference is not true. For optimal lean muscle mass in the fastest period of time, compound exercises rule over isolation exercises. Basically lean mass gaining is about doing workouts that give you the biggest release of growth hormones, that means doing whole body movements that put a lot of stress on you - squats, deadlifts and bench press just to name a few.